Battery fire destroys solar storage system in Mungyeong, South Korea

What happened

A fire broke out at a solar power generation facility with co-located battery energy storage in Mungyeong, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea, less than one year after the storage system was installed. The fire was severe enough to knock the iron door off its housing, and the batteries inside were completely melted. The adjacent mountainside was also charred by the blaze. The incident occurred on the same day as a separate fire at another solar facility elsewhere in the country, part of a wider pattern of solar and storage fires reported in South Korea that year.

At the time of reporting, authorities had been investigating a broader wave of similar fires since the previous year but had not yet determined the exact technical cause. The storage system used nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) battery chemistry.

Contributing factors

Local media noted that temperature and humidity control at these facilities needed further investigation, and industry-wide reporting indicated the majority of solar-related fires in the country were attributed to electrical or mechanical problems, with energy storage devices frequently implicated as the fire origin.

Lessons learned

1. Newly installed battery storage with solar needs close monitoring in the first year, as failures cluster early.
2. Temperature and humidity controls in battery enclosures must match local climate conditions.
3. Multiple similar fires in one region signal the need for a systemic investigation rather than isolated fixes.

More lessons on detection and monitoring, maintenance, inspection and ageing assets, electrical protection and isolation, from every incident on the register.

Not yet known

• Exact technical cause of the fire
• Battery system model and age
• Cost of the damage and downtime

This entry is updated when these are reported. Get an alert for the next one like it.

Source

web.archive.org